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DanKam: iPhone App Corrects Colorblindness

For the past year, security researcher Dan Kaminsky has had an interesting secret side project that has nothing to do with his day job: He's been working on correcting color blindness. This week, he revealed DanKam – an augmented reality app for iPhone and Android that uses unique, configurable color filters to make to make the colors and differences between colors in images and videos readable to colorblind people.

(An excellent complement to the Chrometic browser for the colorblind we featured some time ago.)

The $2.99 app is based on the classic Ishihara test plates (pictured above) and the concept of "colorspaces" familiar to graphic designers: RGB (Red, Green, Blue – used for digital images), CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black – used in print publishing), and YUV (Black vs. White, Orange vs. Blue, and Red vs. Green – a division mimicking how signals are sent to the brain via the optical nerve). The latter actually captures the mechanism of colorblindness, a flaw in the Red vs. Green channel. The app also harnesses the concept of HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) to isolate hue from saturation and value, allowing for adjustments in the red/green channel.

Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of miscellaneous interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, GOOD Magazine, Design Observer and Huffington Post, and spends a shameful amount of time on Twitter.